We currently have one verified winner of the competition for one of two copies of Duke Dashington for iOS. As required by competition rules, our first winner has responded to our prize notification email, and we are currently arranging delivery of his prize. Our second potential winner has not yet responded. As per competition rules, winners must respond by email by midday 7th October 2014 (PDT), so time is running out! If a response has not been received from our second potential winner, by the specified closing time, another winner will be selected at random from those who provided correct answers.

Thank you to all who entered, and a special thanks to the developers of Duke Dashington, Adventure Islands, for donating the prizes.

It has been asked several times, on the Stencyl forums, how to make an actor follow a pre-defined path. Various solutions have been offered in the past, but I'd like to present my own super-easy-to-use behavior that is now available on StencylForge.

In a departure from our technical articles, we're pleased to offer, not only a review of the recently released iOS game Duke Dashington, by Adventure Islands, but also a competition in which two free copies of the game are up for grabs.

Sometimes, errors in our code can be incredibly difficult to find. If we make a major error such as trying to refer to an object that doesn't exist, then when the game is running, we'll at least see an error message telling us that there is a problem; we're given a clue as to where we need to start looking for the problem within our Stencyl code.

However, some errors are not so easy to track down because they are not syntax errors (i.e. 'illegal' code'); our code just doesn't work as planned. These errors are somewhat trickier to locate, and can take hours to resolve. Even more annoyingly, we can spend an age looking for such errors, only for another coder to glance over our shoulder, and immediately spot the problem! Sometimes a bit of luck may have been involved, but more often than not, it's experience that can assist in locating certain types of error.

The purpose of this article is to discuss refactoring, or rearranging code, to make it easy to read, and to assist in eliminating or (more realistically, reducing) the introduction of errors into our code.

When we transferred to our new-style blog in January 2014, we were unable to easily transfer the blog entries from the old system into the new.We have finally found a way to recover and convert the archives, but it's quite time-consuming, so we're only going to be resurrecting relevant and useful blogs containing tutorials. The process will take some time, but we'll release each entry as soon as it is ready for publication.All of the older blog tutorials were created in Stencyl 2.x, which has now been superseded by v3.x, but the instructions should still work. If you notice any problems please do leave a comment, and we'll update them where possible.Please note that the converted blog entries will appear in the correct chronological order, based on the date that they were originally published, so you'll have to scroll to the oldest entries on this blog page in order to see them! However, to save you some trouble, here are links to the first two converted blog entries. We hope that you find them to be useful...ABOUT STENCYL ATTRIBUTES (AND A BIT MORE DEBUGGING)!STENCYL EVENTS : DO THIS ONLY ONCE (PLEASE)!

Back in October 2013, I was excited to launch my Stencyl video training course with almost 7 hours of HD video showing you how to create your own games from scratch without any knowledge of writing computer code.

I am delighted to announce that due to the amazing success of this course, with over 200 students participating, I have been able to reduce the standard price by almost half, to $99 - almost 50% lower than the previous original! However, as a special offer, just for visitors to this blog, I am even more excited to announce that the course is available to you, for a short time, for only $35 at this link.

I'm note sure how long I'll be keeping this special offer open, so if you think you'd like to take advantage of the deal, I recommend signing up now, by clicking on this course link. If you can't see the red $35 special offer flash, it means the special, low price is no longer available!

Now that Stencyl 3.0 has been released to the public, the developers have announced that work is underway on Stencyl 3.1, which will concentrate on an improved toolset which, in the words of the developers, "...hasn't gotten enough love as of late". Naturally, this work is going to take a while to implement, but in the meantime, new features are going to be released one at a time...

The first new feature, initially available immediately, to paying customers only, is the Bitmap Font Editor. Previously, only TrueType fonts could be imported into Stencyl games, but now Stencyl game developers can create their own bitmap fonts using the tool of their choice, and import them straight into their Stencyl games.

Although this new feature is available right now for paying customers, users of the free version will have to wait until some time in 'Q2 2014' to take advantage of this great new addition to Stencyl.